Ahhhh, AI Mode.
It's Google's new AI-powered search experience that’s been quietly eating into traditional organic SEO traffic.
In fact, AI Mode surpassed 1 billion monthly active users globally this year.
The question that matters to us is simple: how do we optimize for it?
No one has truly cracked AI optimization yet, but I'm going to share a tactic I've been using for one of our clients to lift their visibility in AI Mode.
I'll walk through our exact approach and the impact it's having.
It’s Friday. You got this. Let's jump in.
What Is AI Mode?
Let's set the scene first.
AI Mode is Google's LLM-powered chat experience. You can open it from the AI Mode tab, or by expanding an AI Overview into a full AI Mode conversation.
How Do You Optimize for It?
This is where the rubber meets the road.
Search for your target keyword or phrase in Google.
Navigate to Google and start searching. We aren’t using AI Mode yet. Just the good old-fashioned Google search bar we grew up with.
I mostly use this technique for “Best,“ “Top,“ and “Highest-Rated“ style keywords, such as “Best Criminal Defence Lawyers in Calgary.“ However, you can use it for other queries as well.
Customize your searches to your practice area and target keywords.
Navigate to the Discussions and Forums section.
In most (but not all) results, you'll see a section titled Discussions and Forums. This is our AI citation gold mine.
Start a document and list every source you find. I also click “See more“ to find additional citation opportunities.
Build a list of the citation sources.
Staying organized matters, so I build a simple spreadsheet to track the forums and threads I find. This is especially important if they require sign-up and approval from a moderator or admin.
Evaluate each post and decide whether you can add a genuinely useful response.
Let’s get one thing straight. Don’t be a spammer.
But if the commenter is actively looking for a lawyer, or actively asking questions you can share a unique insight into, it's appropriate to add your firm to the conversation.
Here's the important part: when possible, I include the firm’s differentiating qualities.
For example:
Your specific areas of experience
Your number of ratings and reviews
The number of lawyers at your firm
Your years of experience
This information feeds the LLM and, as I'll show in a moment, often shows up directly in the results.
Here’s an example of a Facebook post I found during my research, and the comment I posted.
What Are the Results?
To be clear, our team is still testing and evaluating this tactic. I do not have concrete data to validate the efficacy of this approach.
That said, after several months of implementing it and answering questions authentically, we started to see our results change for high-value AI Mode searches.
Most importantly, the AI-generated response cites the very source we contributed to, and the information contained within it (for example, the number of lawyers at the firm).
Let's Summarize the Steps
If you want to implement this yourself, here's how:
Build a list of keywords you want to earn citations for.
Enter them into Google's search results.
Find discussion sites and forums already talking about the topic.
Create a list of those sites.
Provide authentic comments and answer questions.
Measure your results.
That's it for today.
Ciao for now,
C
